The Clancys of Queens (7 page)

My mother was long obsessed with flowers and gardening, but she'd never had a garden to garden until she met Mark. On her very first trip to his Bridgehampton place, as he cooked dinner, she headed out to cut some blooms from those very bushes. At the time they were the only flowering plants on the grounds, but over the coming days, as he saw the vases in his house fill up with her arrangements and she told him about all the time she spent as a kid at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, he took her to a local nursery and gave her carte blanche to plant whatever, wherever she wanted. And in the three years since—with the help of a ropy-armed, tan, leather-skinned landscaper named John Bell, who would soon become a good friend—she rained down flowers on that place in a joy-driven frenzy, putting in boatloads of potted plants, a couple of vine-covered trellises, a school-bus-size patch of hydrangeas smack in the middle of the rear lawn, and rings of flowers around anything that didn't move. On her more manic planting days, it felt as if, if you kept still for too long, you might look down to find yourself standing inside a circle of tulips.

My favorite of all the flower beds was her wildest creation, a Technicolor jumble of towering hollyhocks, hibiscus, allium, and gladiolas, brimming with bees and butterflies, which happened to frame the front entrance of the next stop on my tour, the Barn. Though it had once been a fully functional, classic, big red wooden barn, Mark had since turned it into one huge sitting room. He put in a proper wooden floor, added paned windows and double glass doors on the westernmost side, and faced all the chairs and sofas in that direction for watching the sunset. At sundown, it was truly the most wonderful place to be, but being alone in there at midday, when the sun sat in the east and it was dim inside, was a whole other story.

While the Barn's primary purpose was for sitting and watching sunsets, it doubled as Mark's very own funhouse. In there he kept his most bizarre furnishings and objets d'art, from the fun and quirky—a hand-carved bald eagle about my height; a gigantic wicker chair, with a seven-foot-high wingback that curled at the top like a question mark and that had circular glass portholes along it (the purpose of this chair eluded even Mark); and a twelve-foot replica of a schoolchild's yellow wooden ruler—to the downright ominous: a pair of five-foot-tall matching brass urns; several horror-movie-quality rocking chairs covered in cobwebs; a couple of cattle yokes hanging on a wall; a twelve-branch candelabra with decades' worth of wax dripping down like a waterfall stopped in time, adhering it permanently to the wormwood table on which it sat; and an actual church confessional—a ten-foot-tall wooden box with a little door and creepy, rattan-covered windows to obscure the face of the person confessing sins.

As always, I did a stroll of the perimeter, dragging a dusty finger along the tables and chairs as I moved in super slow-mo to avoid making the floor creak and averting my eyes from the scary stuff for as long as I could. Finally I would give in, stopping and letting my gaze dart around the room:
rocking chair, cattle yoke, urns—
spin around on my heels with a, “Hello? Anybody there?”—
candelabra, cobwebs, confessional.
Once I'd made it that far, I upped the ante and challenged myself to see how long I could sit inside the confessional, and after ten seconds I upped the ante even further by deciding to actually confess, “Forgive me, Father—
deep breath—
for I have sinned—
you're okay
—I have taken more potatoes…AHHHHHH!” I ran straight out of there, then right out the back door of the Barn, collapsing onto the grass outside in a heap, arms crossed, rubbing away my goose bumps in a patch of sun at the foot of the Cottage.

The three structures on Mark's property were arranged in a triangle. The Main House was on the northeastern side, the Barn was on the southwestern side, and tucked at the northwestern corner was the Cottage. The smallest of the three, the Cottage was still twice the size of my Broad Channel boat shed, with a separate bedroom, a combo living/dining room, and a small galley kitchen. There couldn't have been a more charming guesthouse, but I had little reason to spend much time inside it, with two exceptions: the first was when it rained. Because the Cottage had a thin roof and exposed-wood walls, you could hear the distinct
ping
or
plop
of every raindrop, and as soon as those first drops fell, Mark would have us stop whatever we were doing and rush over there, the three of us sitting in total silence, eyes closed, ears perked, listening to the rain as if it were Schubert's
Impromptus.

The second reason was for my personal Wild West reenactments.

When I finally shook off the willies and got onto my feet, I headed straight into the Cottage for some much-needed, confidence-boosting, cowboy role-play. Nothing in the decor would have suggested that this was the place to do that, save one very important element (the magnificence of which was often lost on the adults who spent any time in there), and that was the pair of swinging saloon doors that separated the kitchen from the living room.

I started with the slow John Wayne slide through: “Well, howdy, partner.” Then on to the preeminent grab-and-pull, followed by double quick draw: “Stick 'em up!” And finally an anachronistic kung-fu-movie-style ninja pounce, followed by three minutes of Bruce Lee meets grand mal seizure karate chops and rapid-fire roundhouse kicks. All in all, I probably busted through those doors a dozen more times that day, changing up the style with each go before the road called, and with a tip of the imaginary hat, I was on my way.

For the first year I visited Mark's country place, from ages four to five, the grassy, low-grade hill that was the communal yard among the three houses held nothing but the twenty-buck vinyl kiddie pool I begged him for—it was the type you filled with a garden hose, about the size of your average round kitchen table, with little cartoon animals printed along the outside, and it was so out of place and scale on this picturesque, roving lawn, seeing it was like stumbling upon a plastic-frosted toy donut on a moor in
Wuthering Heights
. And while Mark found the image of my Power Wheels truck next to his historic farmhouse comical in its absurdity, the baby pool just pissed him off. So one day he decided to put in a real pool.

Two years and God only knows how many tens of thousands of dollars later, where once there was a little ring of plastic holding a bathtub's worth of cold water in the middle of a giant field of grass, there was now an entire stonework, lagoon-inspired pool that, as Mark had hoped, most people refused to believe wasn't a nature-made pond. He didn't want to level the land, so one side was ten feet high, made of many hundreds of pieces of hand-laid slate, a sort of castle wall built into the earth. In lieu of a standard metal ladder with railings was an intentionally askew pile of descending giant gray stones at one end by which you could get in or out of the water. And he asked my mother to plant all sorts of dangly, weeping flowers around the perimeter, their leaves and blooms grazing the water's edge as if they had been there for a hundred years. Naturally, pool toys were strictly forbidden. (I complained about this for years, entirely unable to comprehend that not having a neon-orange foam noodle was a small price to pay for having my own fucking lagoon. In fact, I hadn't even realized until writing this that, in essence, he built the thing for me.)

However incredible the pool was, because I saw it every other weekend in the summer, and because it was now lunchtime, not pool time, after my gunslinger/Jackie Chan escapade in the Cottage, I merrily cruised by it in my truck without as much as a passing glance, on my way to have my turkey and cheese sandwich by the croquet court.

Mark was a self-made guy who, as might already be somewhat obvious, had decided to skip the whole nouveau riche thing and go full steam ahead to “old money.” And so, where someone else of his means might have put in a tennis court, he opted for a regulation, English-style croquet court—for the internationally competitive game that is played on the putting-green-short grass of a lawn about half the size of a soccer field, studded with rectangular wickets only a hairsbreadth wider than the balls you knock through them using a three-foot-tall wooden mallet. That's all to say, it was a shit-ton different from the boxed-up backyard version anyone I've ever met might be familiar with.

I set up camp just outside the perimeter of the court at the far end, one-handing my sandwich as I leaned forward to focus in on Mark, who was lining up to take a shot from the opposite corner. He looked like a grandfather clock at this distance—20 percent clock face (his head and torso) and 80 percent pendulum (the mallet swinging past the stilts that were his legs). The ball came flying in my direction, and Mark followed it, covering thirty yards of ground in four strides. He was still a good car's length away from me on my picnic blanket, but his shadow cast a Mack truck's worth of shade, and in it we could see each other clearly. I gave him a wave, and he gave me a nod, and then he went right back to croquet practice—this wasn't the time to talk, but there would be plenty of that later on.

There was a rhythm to life here, an unspoken, unofficial schedule that took us through each hour of each weekend in nearly the same way from one summer to the next to the next. I would pack up my picnic supplies and drive my truck back to the front of the Main House. Mark would finish croquet practice, Mom would wrap up her gardening, and, depending on the weather, we would go for a swim or head into town to go antiquing. We might hit the outdoor show at the Bridgehampton Elks Club or Mom and Mark's favorite shop in Sag Harbor or Camps', which I think was the name of the couple who owned it, and I would play with their shaggy white sheepdog while Mom and Mark bought more wormwood tables or porcelain pitchers or cattle yokes.

When we got back, we'd start preparing dinner, me on a stool in between Mom and Mark at the kitchen counter, the three of us shucking corn and clams assembly-line style. But no matter how far along we got, we would stop at five o'clock on the nose to have cocktails in the Barn. We chatted away until the lavender hour, at which point we would fall into a trance, robotically raising and lowering our respective gin and tonics and chocolate milks to our mouths without even looking down at our glasses so as not to miss a second of the sunset.

Dinner was always had in the Main House—on the porch on warm nights, at a small table by the fireplace on cold ones, or in the dining room if we had guests. And after dinner there would always be cognac, pie, and conversation—hours and hours of cosmically impactful conversation.

In the mornings we read newspapers and ate pastries, and then the whole thing started again, until about four o'clock on Sunday. That's when Mark would get into his vintage maroon 1978 Lincoln Continental with white leather interior and vanity plates that read VI X (as in 6
'
10
"
), turn on the news or the classical station, and head back to his duplex on Roosevelt Island. And that's when Mom and I would get back into our Cutlass, no vanity plates, blast the Pointer Sisters or Donna Summer, hit the Burger King drive-thru for dinner, and go to our Monday-through-Friday home on 251st Street in Queens.

For the other two weekends a month, I was with my dad—the two of us leaping around a ten-mile radius in southeastern Queens, from our actual home in Broad Channel to the home of hot roast beef and Skee-Ball in Howard Beach (the Big Bow Wow) to the home of my favorite cousins, TJ and Deanna, and my Pall Mall–smoking, Wrangler-jeans-wearing Uncle Dennis and—finally—to the home-away-from-home of Joey O'Dirt, English Billy, Rodger the Dodger, and my dad: Gregory's Bar and Restaurant.

Most regulars at neighborhood bars come by their nicknames through easily distinguishable physical qualities (Curly Pat, Jimmy the Hat, Mumbling Joe, Peg-Leg). If that fails, a nickname can be created on the basis of ethnic origin (English Billy, Irish Mike, and Dutch—just Dutch, because there's never more than one) or a profession (Eddie the Actor; Tugboat, who captained one; and Rodger the Dodger, a defense attorney). But in the entire history of nicknaming, there was only regular called Tara's Father.

Dad started taking me to Gregory's Bar and Restaurant on Metropolitan Avenue in Kew Gardens, Queens, in 1986, when I was six years old. He was single with a kid in tow and looking for love. So, that same year, to really up his odds, he bought himself a white Members Only jacket, a pair of dark-tinted aviator Carrera sunglasses the size of ski goggles, the very latest nylon Nikes with the saw-blade soles, and a brand-new black Chrysler Laser hatchback that talked.

Dad went ahead and splurged on the XE model because it was equipped with: 1) the groundbreaking all-digital dashboard (for me, the biggest thrill of having an odometer that displayed each mile per hour in speed in cutting-edge green boxy font was to scream the fast-rising count aloud every single time Dad took off from a stoplight: “Five, six, seven…eleven, twelve, thirteen…twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty five…” I never once made it higher than thirty before Dad went bananas, screaming, “ENOUGH ALREADY, SCOOTER!!!”); and, 2) the incredible new Electronic Voice Alert System, the height of technology at the time. The owner's manual claimed the car could voice twenty-four different warning messages, though I'll be damned if I ever heard more than two. The first seemed to be delivered completely at random. If we'd be cruising down the Belt Parkway on a sunshiney day, singing along to John Mellencamp or Tom Petty, out of nowhere the radio volume would automatically lower—pretty fucking incredible—so the car could provide us with this lifesaving bit of information: “WIPER FLUID LOW!”

The second message I could actually instigate, and, boy, did I.

Probably the first fifty times Dad picked me up from PS 133 in “The Laser” instead of a squad car, I'd pile in a half dozen kids and close the door, only to crack it back open again. “Shh! Listen…” I'd say, and after what felt like forever, the car would say, “DOOR AJAR!” and everybody would go batshit. “Whoa!!!!!!!! Make it do it again!!!”

Between the new car and clothes, Dad was really going for broke in the trying-to-get-a-girlfriend department, and I was more than thrilled to be a part of this effort: “Scoot, I tell ya, there ain't nothin' a woman likes more than to see a guy who takes care a' his responsibilities—you're my closer, kiddo! Come to think of it, wouldn't be so bad if you let the pretty ones know that I'm the one who sprays your No More Tangles stuff and combs your hair all nice like I do!”

Tomboy that I was, I ordinarily fought off having my hair brushed as if it was torture. But I knew that my looking good was as important as Dad's looking good when we went to Gregory's, so I always took one for the team. (The rarity of this gesture on my part should be noted. Under no other circumstances—for example, church—did I give a crap about how I looked. To this day, one of my dad's favorite stories is the time that he told me I could go outside in my Easter Sunday dress to wait in front of the house while he got ready. Before I stepped out the door, he wagged a finger in my face for a good ten seconds and told me, over and over again, that I was absolutely NOT to play in the dirt or grass. He came out five minutes later and couldn't find me anywhere, until he looked up—I was swinging my legs and bopping my head in bliss, straddling the branch of the tree I had climbed, totally oblivious of the wide stripe of black sap and bark running straight down the front of my white satin dress. Dad was ready to blow a gasket, but right before he did, I cut him off: “You did NOT say anything about the TREE, Dad!” He
but-but-but
ted like a broken-down Broad Channel motorboat for half a minute before finally giving up and storming off. And without another word we walked up Cross Bay to Mass at St. Virgilius; him shaking his head, pissed as all hell at first but getting a tiny bit closer to smiling with each stride; me looking down, feigning regret but holding back a smirk, because I knew by the time we hit the VFW after church, he'd be slapping his leg and laughing like crazy, retelling that story to his buddies: “Little shit had a point—I mean, what the hell's a guy to say? I DIDN'T tell her NOT to go up the goddamn tree!”)

In the end, Dad's full-court-press for love paid off—apparently no woman can resist a well-groomed, pint-size wing-girl coupled with a grown man doing a David Hasselhoff as Michael Knight impression—and by the end of 1986 he was seriously dating one of the Gregory's waitresses, a recent Irish transplant named Jackie. From then on out, he was at the bar every weekend. And on the weekends when I wasn't driving High Rider around Mark's Bridgehampton estate, I was right there with him.

After a couple of years of such weekends, getting ready to go to Gregory's on a Saturday night had become a ritual:

Right around three o'clock the screen door of our Broad Channel house thwacks open a split second before the unmistakable two-note blast of Dad's double-pinky “C'mere!” whistle rings out across the land (my guess would be that it could be heard all the way from the Call-A-Head Porta Potties to about fifty feet offshore on Jamaica Bay). I stop dead in my tracks and hop over a fence or scurry down a tree or drop the ball mid-game or turn whatever little rickety skiff Tommy O'Reilly and I have stolen that day right around and start rowing back to shore with him pissing and moaning the whole way, or some combination of all four, and get my ass home.

“Okay, Scooter, time for the three
S
's!” Dad says when I come in, which I know means, “Shit, Shower, Shave,” so I giggle, and he lifts one eyebrow and teases, “What?!” and I giggle some more, and he winks and whispers “Don't you say it now!” and I don't, but hearing my dad curse in conversation with me, even in acronym, makes me feel like the most badass seven-year-old on God's green Earth.

Standing shirtless in a tight pair of Levi's with a cigarette in his teeth, Dad lays out my clothes on our pilly brown pullout couch, stares at them a second, crinkles his nose, squeezes his Salem into a groove in the ashtray so he can use both hands to “press” my shirt and pants with his palm-irons, then heads for the bathroom, where, forgetting about the still-lit original cigarette, he lights another, which I take as my cue to sneak a puff off the first.

I step out of my old clothes and throw on my new ones in no time, then plop down on the couch waiting for Dad to finish up with the
S
's. In two seconds I'm bored, so I call to him in the shower:

“Eh, Da!!”

“What?”

“Is
asshole
a curse?”

“TA-RA!”

“Sorry!”

Pause.

“Um, Da?”

“Yes?”

“What about
bastard
?”

“Tara Elizabeth! When I get out of here…”

“Okay, okay, I got it!”

“You'd better have ‘got it'! Now bring me my Norelco, will ya?!”

I roll my eyes and let my body slip lifelessly off the couch all the way to the floor. Once there, I do a good bit of melodramatic writhing around on the carpet before finally lumbering up onto my feet and huffing and puffing over to his dresser. And then I stop. And stare. Like it's the very first time I'm seeing them, like I can even remember a time they weren't there…

For the extent of my life thus far and stretching ahead for at least the next twenty-odd years, no matter where my dad roams, the top of his dresser always holds the same series of items: one Norelco brand electric shaver standing upright in its charger, one gold chain necklace with three charms—a crucifix, one that reads #1
DAD
, and a round gold medallion with a miniature silver replica of his police badge in the middle—one black leather flip case with his actual police badge inside; one bottle of Paco Rabanne cologne; one men's Speed Stick musk deodorant; his money clip; one classic black acrylic comb; a little pile of loose change; and two .38 Smith & Wesson military- and police-issue revolvers.

Those guns live on top of my dad's dresser the way the Cocoa Puffs live on top of the fridge, the way my little lineup of Hot Wheels lives on the window ledge, the way I live here and in my grandparents' basement and in a Bridgehampton mansion all at the same time, and this is just how things are and how things always have been, and I don't think much about any of it, until I do, and I guess that all started with the guns.

“Scooter?!” Dad yells from right behind me, and by the look on his face when I finally turn away from the dresser to face him, it seems he's been calling me for a while.

“Scooter?!!”

“Oh, hey, Da.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“I been waitin' on that shaver!”

“Right, sorry.”

Dad gives me a puzzled once-over, then shrugs it off, takes the Norelco, heads back to the bathroom, shaves, comes out, pulls an undershirt on over his head, tucks it in, ties his shoes, straps on his brown leather ankle holster, then his hip holster, opens the top dresser drawer and takes out his bullets, sees me still standing in the same spot, and stops. “You know what? How 'bout you pop a squat, kiddo?”

I take a seat at our kitchen table, and Dad lays his .38s down in front of me. He nods and pats the front pocket of his jeans to make the bullets in them jingle and let me know that the guns are unloaded and it's all right, but I'm not convinced. So he gives the approval: “It's all right.” Which doesn't work.

He tries again, “Go ahead, Scooter, pick 'em up.”

There is no locked-bottom-drawer-of-the-mahogany-desk-in-the-study in our house. There is no study. There is no desk. In a three-hundred-square-foot, room-divider-less, closet-less former boat shed, problems can't hide; they are right out there with your deodorant and your Paco Rabanne and your kid, day and night. And at some point, there is no way around them but to pick 'em up.

I'm so short that as I slide the guns toward me on the tabletop, they are almost parallel with my eyes. Just before they reach the table's edge, I take a breath, tighten up my grip, and give one last tug. The weight of the guns surprises the shit out of me, and I let out a
whoa!
as they start to dip down, despite my intention of lifting them up. I finally steady my hands and get them going in the right direction. And I don't stop until I'm in full-on touchdown pose.

Dad now gives slow, careful instructions:

“Point them down.” I do.

“Get your fingers away from the trigger.” I do.

“Now put 'em back on the table.” I do.

“And don't ever touch 'em again.” I don't. Ever.